Who Was Joseph Murgittroyd?

It is becoming more likely that most, if not all, Americans bearing the surname spelling, MURGITTROYD, can trace their ancestry to Joseph Murgittroyd, who lived in Claverack, Columbia County, NY at the turn of the ninetieth century. My twenty years of genealogical research has uncovered families with various spellings of the Murgittroyd surname such as Murgatroyd, Murgetroid, and Murgitroyde, but our spelling seems to have been consistently retained by descendants of the family Joseph established.

What we know of Joseph is entirely formed by small fragments of public records he left behind. Joseph first appears on a 1779 tax list of the citizens of Claverack, NY. At that time his property is assessed at 150 pounds. He is listed as a nearby neighbor of Cornelius and Jeremiah Muller. We know that Cornelius was or would shortly become Joseph’s father-in-law since the next record of Joseph is when he brings his first child, Mary, for baptism at Linlithgo Reformed Church, Livingston, NY on August 12, 1781. Mary had been born to Joseph and his wife, Rachel Miller (Rachel’s family name changed over time from Mulder to Muller and finally to Miller), on July 12, 1781. The baby’s sponsors were the grandparents, Cornelius C. and Margaret Miller.

At least a short period of military service interrupted Joseph’s domestic life after the birth of his daughter since his next public record is signing a pay voucher for one pound eight shillings and ten pence for service in the "Class of Capt. Jeremiah Muller’s Company" of the New York State Militia in April, 1782. The fact that Joseph was one of the few members to sign his own name rather than by mark indicated that he was somewhat better educated than the other members of the company.

Joseph and Rachel thereafter settled down to their lives and raised a large family in Claverack. After Mary they had a succession of six male children all baptized at the local Dutch Reform Church of Claverack. Nicholas was born September 20, 1782; John Bolton on February 13, 1784; Cornelius on June 11, 1788; Peter Miller on September 8, 1792; Jeremiah Miller on August 11, 1796 and probably died very young since another child bearing the same name was born June 15, 1800. These five males would establish the modern branches of our family. Two of them, Nicholas and Cornelius would stay in the Claverack area and their descendants would eventually travel down the Hudson River to establish the New Jersey branch of the family, while the others would travel westward along the traditional migration route of the Mohawk River Valley into western New York, Michigan and the West Coast.

The Murgittroyd homestead in Claverack is referred to often in various land and probate records but I have not as yet been able to determine the exact location. In an indenture filed the fifth day of August 1794 Joseph gives title to about two acres of land in Claverack bounded by the road from Great Barrington to Hudson, NY to a Elihu Chauncey Goodrich. This is the same land which had been leased to Joseph by Paul Tibbits on the twenty third day of February, 1788. The indenture seems to be security for the loan of one hundred and ninety eight pounds.

The will of Joseph’s father-in-law, Cornelius C. Muller whose last codicil was signed January 10, 1799 and was filed August 27, 1799 repeatedly refers to the house where Joseph Murgittroyd lived as a landmark in making his bequests. The will makes bequest of the land Joseph Murgittroyd once lived on to the then five living children of Joseph. (The second Jeremiah Miller Murgittroyd was not yet born.)

Joseph last appears in the 1810 Federal Census and thereafter disappears from the records. I have not been able to find Joseph’s final resting place despite a survey of much of the burial grounds of Columbia County, NY. He may have been buried in a long forgotten Muller family cemetery.

Much is still to be known about Joseph such as his place of origin. We do not know if Joseph was the Murgittroyd "Gateway" ancestor, or in other words, the first to come to the new world. Surveys of early ship passenger records should no Joseph Murgittroyd among the passengers to America. The closest possibility is a Joseph Murgatroyd, who came to America about the ship Thebis in 1757 as a convicted criminal from England. Since Joseph’s last child was born in 1800, forty three years after the 1757 date, it seems unlikely that this is our Joseph. Hopefully additional research will be able to fill in more of Joseph’s story.